From Tech to Public Philosophy: Johnathan Bi on Production Quality and Patronage Networks

being an independent scholar in this day and age is like building relationships at scale if I have you in my ears for 20 hours listening to your podcasts I'm already going to have a relationship with you I write really freely and I say

things I could never say as a professor to me it's a more full flourishing my own vision for my scholarly life but it is a desert basically mimetically and

that's a very serious loss I don't really care about raw numbers I care a lot more about having the right people that essentially I want to be friends with my stuff Silicon Valley will increasingly be a breakaway civilization

within America all of the money all of the power is going to be circulating in this because it's increasingly the source of all new economic value generation I think there is a danger of

trying to pursue the higher good without resolving the lower good and I think one danger there is the starving artist perhaps not only loses food but also

loses his art all right Jonathan so you have embarked on this big strategy to create a brand and a kind of new sort of content Empire in the humanities

focusing on great thinkers great books and as this is one of the things we're very interested in here in my neck of the woods this sort of new economy around independent scholarship and so I

wanted to have you on today to just get a sense of how you're seeing this landscape what it is exactly you're trying to build and the Strategic calculations that have gone into how you're designing your project so I want

to hear what are you thinking what are you how are you trying to crack this nut of building a a viable impactful but independent scholarly project on the internet so why don't we just start with

give us a little bit of a rundown of the project what exactly are you building what are the basic parameters of your project so my project is called great books of the West it's pretty

self-explanatory it's a lecture and interview series on the lecturing side every lecture they're about two hours long monologues I I invite about 70 or

so of my friends in New York to to film it just like a classroom seminar and then they cover sort of the essence of a great book so we've done nich's genealogy we've done Russo's first and

second discourse and in July we're going to do Shakespeare's juliia Caesar so fiction as well as philosophy and on the interviews they're supposed to be deep Dives so once you get the introduction

to a great book you might want to the deeper pulses of that thinker and in nich one example is n's critique of Free Will right and so the interviews are

usually IDE of the great thinker that spans across books but the curiosity is probably pulled by the introduction to that one great book right so it's almost like a t-shape where you go really deep into one book and then there's an idea

that you're interested in and so the interviews are supposed to be supplements and they're about an hour to two hours long and they're with the world class scholars in their fields I've done two at U Chicago two at

Columbia and one at Boston College ameritus and they're all around a seminal piece of secondary work that that scholar has has written and so that's the general shape of the project

and now you have a background in startups and business and you recently found some success with some of the companies you were building with Joe Lonsdale and then after you decided to

take a step away from the business world and embark on this project one of the things that's interesting about the way you're doing it is you're very interested in the high production value you have you me some of the clips of the lectures that you're doing it's this

wood paneled lecture hall that you seem to be renting out and it's really kind of going really big in terms of making it look really Swanky and things like that and so I'm curious about how you

see the economics of it all is this going to become a big business how if so how is it going to pay back the costs how give us a sense of like the business landscape and the calculations that

you're making when you carved out what this project is going to look like yeah so would it be okay if I gave an overview of why I'm doing this because I think that will like really answering

that why question will help the and that will also give our listeners a background about me so I was born in Beijing really born and raised in Beijing um and and my sort of oneliner

is that Beijing is the most western city in the world if by Western we mean modern West like technocratic anti metaphysical very pragmatic aspiring to a clean break from history and I think

most modern education systems are like this where they they push you away from the humanities right and this wasn't always true n for example uh he was pushed away from mathematics and pushed towards Classics right that's what the

smartest people did and so in my upbringing I was pushed to mathematics and I was taught to look down upon the humanities and so even all the way up until College I went to Columbia to

study computer science and I dropped out my freshman spring to build a company that eventually failed and so I got into philosophy as a form of consolation as a

form of self- diagnosis of what had gone wrong and so my engagement into philosophy was always very practical it was always very how do I live a good life and so even when philosophy takes

me down these weird metaphysical rabbit holes I think there's a very practical question behind all of it I eventually got into Gerard who I did a seven-part lecture series on and we did an interview on that and that's what

initially gave me the idea of doing this lecture series and so just to back a little bit I think this will still be interesting to your audience after I met philosophy it was like a drug I I I

could not get enough I think you have a metaphor where you say philosophy is like doing the hardest drug or something and and once you're on it you just want to try to find the the most extreme takes possible and that was

definitely me I had both a CS degree and had studied philosophy historically a lot of people refer to philosophy as a kind of a conversion experience many right people have testified to this sort

of thing and it's not for nothing that sort of the great philosophers and the great Saints have a similar conviction around their calling yeah and I believe there's a great biography

about Augustine called Augustine of Hippo that detailed how his conversion into philosop so away from the active life towards the contemplative life actually prefaced his sort of conversion

of faith that he was this hyper tracked lawyer essentially right in in Rome and he was like writing speeches for for the emperor and he just gave it all away and

he got a villa near Lake quomo I think or something like that with a bunch of his friends and he aspired to live a life of uh not self-imposed exile but an epicurian life of retreat perhaps and then it was through all these various

things that he got pulled into being a bishop but anyways another story okay that is to say guess what I'm trying to say is I was pulled both by the active and contemplative life and frankly I'm

quite upset that they're not as well integrated I'm doing an interview next Monday about a book called the Roman Republic of letters and it detailed how

people like Julius Caesar Brutus Cicero obviously were not just men of action in their day but they were some of the leading scholars in their field like apparently when Caesar was scaling his

the Alps with his Legions he was writing a treaties on Roman oratory and that was like the def one of the definitive treaties that people responded to I suppose one way of thinking about this

project is I'm trying to combine the active and the contemplative life when I was still in college and deciding what I wanted to do afterwards I wanted to do a philosophy PhD that's what I wanted to do that was where my passion was I'd

become obsessed obsessed with Gerard and Hegel rouso n but there was something off that I couldn't quite put into words about philosophy

phds and the way I would frame it is it seemed like especially as they got closer and closer to the job market and especially early professors you'll be able to speak a lot more to this they

were miserable and I didn't really know why but that was the empirical fact and so for me I was like if I'm doing this for the good life but philosophy the the way that people practice philosophy now

is going to prevent me from the good life or prevents a lot of people from the good life it seems and what's then what's the point of doing this and so it was because of that that I didn't end up

doing a philosophy PhD but instead try to establish myself uh financially uh and socially first and so I went to build a company which was not what I

wanted to do at all or that's a bit strong I it was by far this the second choice but I wanted to establish myself you know I I think that in our lives there's a Maslow's hierarchy of needs

and I think there's a danger of trying to pursue the higher good without resolving the lower good and I think one danger there is the starving artist

perhaps not only loses food but also loses his art and what I mean by that is if you need your art to make money for

you like immediately tomorrow then you'll succumb to all these different pressures of the market Market that you might not right and by the way there's a country analogy of this I think one of

the African leaders he sent one of his citizens to Oxford and he went up to leanu and he was very proud that he sent the guy to study Classics and Le kuu

basically did the verbal equivalent of slapping him across the face and be like you guys don't even have plumbing yet and you see I'm trying to say here that as with the individual alongside the

country there's a sort of Step order of what thing you want to satisfying life first and and for me it seemed I wanted to satisfy obviously health I had that already and finances was the next step

so I built a company and I try to build it in the most contemplative domain which I conceive to be finance and investing so we built a wealth

management platform and it was going really well it was going I was supposed to stay there for 6 years founder level Equity I left 3 years in and really when the the stock

became valuable I I left most of my upside on the table because I couldn't wait to get back to doing philosophy full-time so there's a I think vber said this he says the Protestants and the

Catholics have the exact opposite response when you raise their wages the Protestant Works more because his goal is in some sense to maximize and the Catholic works less because his goal is

to satisfy and I suppose through that decision of the company became a you know almost everyone right would like now is the time to stay at this company like we finally got it working but for

me it was like okay I I I I might have hit my minimum of the money I need Now's the Time to Leave okay and so I still fa that decision of do I want to go back to grad school that's still something I

want to do and we should talk about that instead I decided to do this public lecture series partially because of the Gerard lecture series and its success

that that I gotten it was 10 hours long and it has about now 200k plus views like when I did it it was just like a passion project I thought only the

craziest weirdos like myself would be interested in that but it got great views from a lot of people H hang on let me challenge you on that I that's not the impression that I've ever gotten from you I've gotten I always get the impression from you and and like our

mutual friend David rather that when you knew going into this you were going to build something that was high production value it was going to look and sound just like it needed to look in sound to hit hard and you were G to you were

going to produce it hard and I feel like from the beginning you you were confident it was gonna you going to make a product that would crush it on YouTube and that's what you did not the are you kind of is this like a false modesty or

what's going on here or what am I getting wrong I I wish it were not the Gerard lectures so the the Gerard lectures was the passion project that gotten a lot more successful than it did

and let let me be very clear here and I think this is one thing that you and I talked before this podcast started which is I don't really care about raw numbers I care a lot more about having the right

quality of of the right people that essentially I want to be friends with viewing my stuff and so it wasn't just the raw number success that surprised me it was the type of people who took out

10 20 30 hours of their lives to watch it sometimes two or three times and so this what you are right Justin is that this current lecture series I'm very confident in because of the jard

lectures because I think they they're going to do very well but when I was making the Gerard lectures I was content of just putting something that I conceed to be beautiful out there and that

actually is the first reason why that's by far the primary reason why the design like I put so much effort into the production which is that I just want it to be beautiful there are other benefits

to it and we can talk about it in fact I think there's even Financial benefits to spending a lot of money on production value but the primary reason is aesthetic it's what melli said that you feel like these books are so important

you put on your best suit when you discuss them this is great let's pause on this though because this is fertile terrain here so what I'm trying to tease out of you because I think it's just very interesting for the audience and a lot of people in the audience are

embarking on their own similar types of of projects trying to build some independent body of work on the internet with your project so far you've put a lot of resources into them from the beginning from one sort of standard

conventional wisdom around internet content and building brand building a body of work on the internet building an audience whatever you want to call it one common idea is that you should start small and you should iterate fast

and you should just use your iPhone real quick and you should not really worry about this massive investment of resources which you've embarked on from the beginning especially you must have I'm curious like you must have some

sense of how this is going to pay for itself in the long run or is it just is this just pure consumption expenditure you're just like I'm G to burn whatever amount of money I need to make this look good somehow it's going to pay for

itself in some undetermined way do you must have I'm presuming presuming you have some kind of model of how it pays for itself just think help us because you're saying that you went into it with like low expectations and you thought

only a few weirdos would be interested in it but I kind of don't fully believe that because you wouldn't invest so much in the early stages so how do you think about all that right right so for the Gerard lectures that was my initial

intention which is I'm happy just putting something beautiful out there with this that's still the primary desire I want to put something beautiful out there that I'm happy looking back on

10 20 30 years from now and if this gets one magnitude less than the Gerard lectures but I'm happy with it let me put it this way if I had a choice in in front of me of putting like a shameful

click baity title versus like a dignified one that got 10% as much clicks I would do the dignified one but that's also what I was trying to get at with the Maslow's hierarchy of needs

like I don't need this thing to a ton of money for me now given the company now the the funding model and and this is something that you asked about is I'm getting very big checks of

essentially PID patrons who are willing to support me and that's kind of how all this whole thing works and this is also why I don't really care about the mass numbers which is the people I want to

reach and the people that can write big checks they are going to be more attracted to the highbrow intellectual stuff which is what I'm interested in so I that's what I'm trying to align I'm

trying to find my audience I'm trying to find what I want to do this sort of more artistic beautiful style and I also need to find the financial model that funds all all of it so to answer your question

directly right now the Gerard lectures were purely funded by grants essentially just think modern equivalence of the Renaissance model all right by the way that was another big advantage of of building the company is that I met all

these mostly people in Tech but also in finance who were in their stage of their career where they were interested primarily in G not primarily but in giving what's funding this entire

project right now is patronage now I am hoping to open up other channels one example is I think I'm going to put all my transcripts on substack behind a

pay wall so like I don't know $10 a month $80 a year and there is a world in which if there's not people reading that

as you know that could sustain itself but my like plan going forward is just keep raising like patronage from like foundations and and individuals I see

okay and so that is the primary thing now with that said and as our good friend David who I made the Gerard lecture series will tell you once you have a high quality audience there are

so many ways to monetize that you can I don't know I mean ads would be the the thing that that is obvious but again I I I don't really want to do ads because I'm trying to create a work of art here and so I'll pause there but but there's

more to go into no that's great so it sounds like you have the intention of building some kind of monetization model around this over time to make it more sustainable but right now you are totally agnostic about what that's going to look like you're not worried about it

right now there already is a business model which is patronage and that's that that's the business model that has that has funded the entirety of the Renaissance right but yes I am to your

point trying to expand to other Revenue sources but I'm not in a rush so to speak great sure yeah I was just curious about that trying to paint the picture of what you're of what you're building and how you're thinking about it

strategically so we can all learn from how you're seeing it there's so many different people trying to carve out space for themselves in this new world and everyone's making different decisions and calculations based on on on what they're seeing so I try to get a

inventory of of all the interesting people doing this sort of stuff hey everybody real quick I finally finished writing my latest book The Independent scholar and it's the best thing I've written the most important thing I've written because it compiles everything

I've learned over the past 5 years figuring out this new lifestyle SL business model of mine working full-time as an independent scholar outside of Institutions and on the internet since I

left Academia 5 years ago I've been experimenting like crazy testing all different kinds of things I've done books and courses and subscriptions and I've tried it all I've tested every

model and I've learned so much I've made so many mistakes but I've also done things well and I've earned a few hundred, dollars doing all these different things now I've really got the model down the ideal model I've narrowed

it down to what works the best and what's most reproducible for most people it's just a super practical Focus book what works and what doesn't work in the most concise and practical format

possible so buy it order it now online at other life. c/s scholar you can also just search for the independent scholar book maybe add Justin Murphy in there if

you want to find it more easily other life. scholar go by the independent

life. scholar go by the independent scholar the ideal model everything I've learned over the past 5 years working full-time as an independent scholar thank you I'm very proud of it other

life. scholar I had an interesting

life. scholar I had an interesting conversation several months ago probably more than a year now with uh Sam you probably know of he has a very interesting model doing quite sophisticated sort of geopolitical

research and he also talked about patrons and he talked about that for him it's a little bit different it's more like clients but it's patrons as well so many different ways to hack it and I'm I'm very interested in building

knowledge of how people are doing this kind of stuff so go ahead and just to be clear here I don't know that much about s's model but to my understanding it's more like Consulting where you know like

you you hire him to explore a space for me it's the exact same model as if you gives to an art museum like you don't get anything like you can come to my lectures if you want but you are funding

primarily and this is why I go back to Art the whole time and hopefully why this is this is why now it's starting to make sense why I I I put so much emphasis on aesthetic value this is

primarily an artistic project it's not a moral project it's not a social political project it's an artistic project that these books are in some deep sense beautiful okay bring us into

some of those first conversation you had with patrons how do you make that approach how do you make that ask obviously without going into overly

private details tell us about how you think about that in terms of the kind of social elements because there's always a kind of personal element there's always some kind of implicit exchange element

but it's often an implicit just because there are a lot of people out there who have some kind of interesting creative project and yeah they probably are only a few people removed from wealthy people who do have an inclination to give to

worthy projects but a lot of people have no idea how to Broach those conversations how do you how did you think about that then and bring us into the room with you back then well yeah well the first thing I'll say is I think

this model really only works if for a specific type of project right I'm not creating a podcast I'm not here creating the John B show right like I'm trying to

rescue the key insights from these great books and trying to publicize like Knowledge from the great thinkers that are still alive so point one is a

pro-social contribution to humanity not a personal brand building kind of oper the first one makes much more sense to approach different stakeholders yeah the second one and

I'll be is that the the people who have funded this project so far I'm hoping to expand my group Beyond

this they they know me and they're funding it for me and so there's no real like tit fortat cuz I'm not giving them anything I I'm literally like the conversation is you give me money I give

you nothing does that sound like a good deal and they only say yes because they know me and so that's G to be quite hard to replicate and for me right I knew

these people because I built companies and I was in that Social Circle with them to take a step back I do think this is going to change once the content is

already out right because what's really cool and and you know Justin you've been such a great influence for me even to go on this right I think you're the first person whom I heard like independent scholar as well as full stack Professor

vocabulary that I've digested and and tried to embodied and one thing that you mentioned a lot is being an independent scholar in this day and age is like building relationships at scale if I

have you in my ears for 20 hours listening to your podcast I'm already going to have a relationship with you so actually this is actually a good example some of the donations that I've gotten

were from people who knew me from the Gerard lectures so in fact most of it was from that I guess what I'm trying to say is this Patron model they're doing it for you that that's number one like

you you got to understand the patons are funding this for you and you need pre-existing relation that you can tap into but those relationships can come from content because content is a way to

build right so I I hope that's helpful no this is great and I think this is such a good topic for people to listen to because this is the it's such a subtle thing these sort of interpersonal subtleties around uh building

relationships and getting to the point where you could confidently ask someone for a a simple gift for a cultural project that you want to undertake it's so subtle and no one like people don't like to talk about it because it's kind

of awkward sometimes and there's no blog post out there where you can learn like how to secure a patron it's too subtle for that so that's why this conversation is very interesting and I appreciate your frankness about it I want to pause on on on something you said though

because it's so fascinating when you said I just tell people I'm asking for your money and you're not going to get anything in return I'm a proud Irish Catholic guy who's like I I don't have that kind of thing in me so I'm I'm

curious like literally my shamelessness my shamelessness yes yeah teach us how literally how do you say that I'm really curious how do you say that so the first thing I want to cave on I don't think

this is original or that original in the sense that again like all the museums are funded this way right you know Columbia like Columbia Brown Harvard the ivy league is fun in this way you're

absolutely right it's it's a whole it's a whole tradition it's a known kind of uh way of funding such projects so you're absolutely right and there are PE there are bodies of money that's what

foundations are whose mission it is to to give away money to fund projects that are pro-social so that's the one thing I want to caveat is that this is now now what what what might be new about this

is applying this to the independent scholar sort of model right right and something also worth distinguishing is you're not doing traditional nonprofit fundraising I I suspect because obviously like one way to do this is

yeah you make a list of all the foundations and writing the the grant providing sort of organizations and then you do the kind of nonprofit stump speech and and you try to go but you're doing something we're talking about something different here we're talking

about which is very relevant to to this current moment in time it's particularly Germaine to kind of Internet Savvy people people like in our kinds of networks it is a much more personal

private quiet sort of informal thing where you're going to certain dinners you're meeting certain people You're Building companies so we're talking about a different game than the traditional kind of nonprofit fundraising from institutions and grants

like you've mentioned you mentioned institutions and stuff but what what you're doing I believe is much it's more subtle than that so people to know the inner mechanics give us more about about how to make it work and what are the

rules of this game and and how to do it successfully I mean honestly I I think the key lesson is just you just got to ask like there are like things that make

it more or less subtle but but those are almost too person specific to give a general principle one thing that surprises me is that people don't ask for things they want like people don't go out out there and ask the cute girl

that they want to that they want to take on a date with and sometimes they say no but sometimes they say yes it's just crazy to me that people don't ask for

things they want and I suppose from my perspective this is not that different so the first thing I'll say is you are right about the the foundation versus individual thing I I do hope to

eventually tap into the foundations but that requires some kind of track record and a good way to think about I think all of this is for-profit Venture fundraising where early on especially if you have a really weird idea right and

almost any independent scholar project that raises money in this way is a weird idea like mine is you want individ right you don't want the the Institutional Investor who has layers of bureaucracy

with Associates and the BC firm making the decisions who are risk averse who want to don't get fire from their job you want the individuals will respect the type of risks you're taking and

that's also how what my current base again my current base are people who have patrons without seeing anything and then hopefully once the project is launched I'll be able to tap into that

Foundation network but the other big thing I'll say is social proof right once you have one of these big vetted names again it's just like for Prof it's just like for-profit Venture fundraising

once you have one of these big names the second one is going to be a lot easier um for it to get get off and again if you don't have that early launch thing you can have content out there already

right you can record podcast at very low costs and then expand there but in terms of the actual like way actual like literal words to ask it's probably so

dependent but it's literally just a form of I'm doing this project for these reasons will you support this and many people will you know you got to be thick skinned so I don't think the Catholic is

helping but but and surprising people do I think you're let me say Let me let me say one more thing here obviously you need to find people who are already

interested in the things that you're engaged in if you talk to a stem guy about funding my Humanities project that's not going to resonate but I think there's a deeper Point here which is you

actually don't want you you don't want there are some people that would give you money that you should not take money from and that's the same as the Venture mod as the Venture as well right there

are bad people that you don't want on your Capital sheet not because they're bad actors but because they're not a good fit for your company and so when I look out for my initial set of

patrons it's just I filter heavily for people who are interested in the humanties because if they're not interested in the humanities um they're probably interested in this in some kind

of political reason right like I want to spin the cannon in a specific political way but that's not the project I'm interested in I want a a General survey and an authentic survey to all of these

authors and that's why I started with rouso traditionally considered on the left and N traditionally considered on the right I I want to turn off patrons who want to fund an exclusively political project I think you're really

on to something important when you emphasize that on some level you just have to ask and a lot of people just don't ask for anything I think you're absolutely right that what I'm getting from your kind of case study so far is

that if you are just simply confident in what you want to do you genuinely believe that it's a kind of pro-social contribution to the culture then if you

have genuine relationships with people who are wealthy and are interested in giving and they've said as much uh in different Avenues then you should simply

just have the courage to go right up to them and ask and most people are too afraid to do that so in fact not that many people really even do it and if you just do it and you're confident and calm

and respectful I think what I'm hearing from you is you might just be Sur urised how straightforward it is yes obviously we don't want to make it seem too too too straightforward you're going to get a lot of rejections

and you have to be thick skinned about it but if it's a legitimate project of course yeah yeah I I I had some people like laugh me off but it's interesting because to the just like independent

Scholars I there's some people in the Academy I told them what I want to do which again I think the primary reason I'm doing this there's still a I think a

non-zero chance I'm going to get a PhD is I simply want a broad survey into the cannon um I have no idea what Pascal said I have no idea what Berkeley said and I think that's like outrageous that

that I don't know what these great thinkers and those are just a few examples right I haven't read the Republic cover to cover and I think that before I go down into narrow interests and for me that's more philosophy around

philosophy of technology and in recognition theory that I want a proper survey and I think this is the best way way to get a survey into the Canon which is spending six weeks on each book

talking with all the top professors who've written secondary works on them and when I told people in the academy this some people said so you're going to be a YouTube philosopher and it's that's the type of reaction you're going to get

when you're fundraised as well so it's not like ask and you shall receive it's ask and knock your head filled with blood and then maybe you'll receive but

you need to ask or else you will not receive that's all very rich and I think quite inspiring for people who are thinking about these types of projects and finding their own way you know enough about me I've carved out a different path and as I said I have a

certain Irish Catholic Pride I could never ask anyone wealthy for anything at all as a gift I'm too cowardly and prideful and it's not a it's not a virtue you're you're not as Shameless as I am that's what I'm hearing well you can frame it in different ways but I

don't in any way say this claiming it to be a virtue I see it much more it's really an inhibiting thing more than anything but point is people play to their strengths and people have different callings and I've always personally been I'm excited and called

forth by by the challenge of economic independence combined with the scholarly life and I'm just I'm excited by that challenge and and I'm fed by that vision

of can I be a successful sort of small scale Artisan of knowledge and insight and as a writer can you make the writing and and the scholarly Life float on its

own terms in the Contemporary economy in new ways given all of our affordances and and I've just always had to TCH that there are interesting ways to make it work so I'm just I'm dedicated to to to figuring that out and that's my play on things and it suits my temperament I

don't think it's better or worse but that's why it's an interesting conversation yeah well let me ask you this a lot of people on substack right I'm sure you'd consider substack as one of these ways that a small Artisan could

keep him or herself a flat a lot of the substack it's literally or patreon is the better example A lot of people on substack they don't give their paid subscribers anything the paid

subscription is simply for a way to for people to express their thinks in a way that's the exact form of what I'm suggesting here but just in different check sizes and through different routes so there's no I I don't

think there's a difference in kind between this and patreon it's a great great point it's a really important point and I've always noted that myself as well the only difference is it's a really important Point Jonathan and for

people who are like building out a kind of monetized project it's actually crucial to understand that like you're you might think of yourself as like providing a product to customers but but often you're not really and if you

overthink that element you're going to be stressing yourself out in ways you don't necessarily need to it is actually often much more like a donation the differ difference though is the difference is between the high touch

interpersonal negotiations that one embarks on if you're going to like try to raise real gifts that's sort of its own model and its own sort of challenges and that's right certain kind of attitude and Framing and all that

whereas when you build a kind of content system online that is it it looks and feels much more like a a business with customers paying for things but you're absolutely right at the end of the the the the underlying sort of logic or

psychology of the audience buying into your operation is actually more similar Than People realize so that's an absolutely important point and even in

the academy right because who who funds our universities it's not Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse right it's the it's the same people that I'm raising money directly from obviously there's a layer

in between the endowment as well as the the hiring Committee in universities but you're always on this this show essentially right you're always trying to fundraise in some way now the the one

thing I'll say is I think what needs to come first before you think about any of this is what do I want to do and if I want to create and I know Justin this is

neither your nor my ambition if I wanted to create a popular podcast that anyone would be glad to to to to to listen to maybe Rogan or something like that this would not be a great fundraising model

for that one is I probably can make a lot more money if if I truly am going to reach like tens of millions of dollars by selling them I don't know vitamins or something the second one is I just don't

think people would be willing to fund that because like why am I funding two guys like just chatting right and so primarily I think people should you know

Justin your project is almost like having a deck or PDF showing people like if this is the content you want then these are the ways that you can fund it if these are the content you want then these are the ways that you can fund it

but I think that question should come first which is what do I want to do and for me I want to really understand these great books and I want to help other people understand these great books like

the back of their hand and that's not going to have a public appeal like I'm not going to be able I don't think I'll be able to fund this on selling athletic greens you know but that is primary what

do I want to do that is primary and I think that's absolutely you know important for people to think about as well and you're right it does explain some of the differences between our own orientations because one of the

drawbacks of approaching wealthy donors asking for gifts is it's a great model if it fits what you're doing and it fits your temperament as it does for you I think quite perfectly one of the

drawbacks is that you as you're pointing out it really does need to be a kind of public service operation and that's how you have to genuinely feel it that has to be the genuine kind of intention or else it's not g to it's not going to

feel right for anyone and it's probably not going to work out in any way for me I'm less pro-social I think I see the independent scholar as antisocial in a way and that's the aspect of things that I'm interested in solving and Building A

reproducible playbook for is like how can the kind of militant aggressive kind of antisocial truth-telling individual do that sustainably in a way that's Unstoppable and where you can also have

a reasonably comfortable economically secure life that you're on to something because that doesn't really work to you can't ask someone for big gift or like you know hey hey could you give me a lot of money so that I can be a wild

individual saying whatever I want and kind of antisocial crazy guy it's a much it doesn't fit as right so you're absolutely right I think about that right well I think there there's something about what I'm doing right now

which makes it a very no-brainer kind of Target for this type of patronage but maybe I do want to challenge a bit about your assumption as well because most of the again the Renaissance the the

wealthy like the medich just wanted the top thinkers around them right and so maybe it's not I have the luck of being able to go to a very broad swap of donors who are

interested in Humanities who immediately understand why it's good and Noble to have accessible introductions to the great books out there but if you're interested in I don't know artificial

intelligence and Technology if you're interested in specific political angle left or right there are ways to I think apply this model to that I think it'll

be more difficult and you're going to have to be more targeted but but there are ways as well because and again the empirical evidence I'll point to is that that's how the the Renaissance was was funded and most of them were doing just

like weird stuff it literally was like fund me to do this thing yeah for sure for sure yeah yeah I just think it's interesting to note the different conditions because there are always some

trade-offs involved and I think like totally in an ideal world you're absolutely right you can have these sort of donor relationships where there really is there really are no strings attached and you're really for all intents and purposes really quite free

to to pursue the work that you're saying that you'd like to pursue on the other hand of course historically we also know at some margins there's always going to be some constraints there's always social and political elements that are

very subtle but also omnipresent and inescapable in the final analysis and I think for your project there's just no problem with it at least for the foreseeable future but obviously the history of patronage is Rife with

examples of conflicts as well and totally totally and and there are cases where people get into hot water because they upset their Patron or the demands of the patron become too onerous and so

on so yeah it's and and um one thing to add here is that I think it was Michelangelo or something when I don't know if it was the medich who funded the David but I think someone

came to the David and said the nose is too big and it it was like one of his patrons or someone very powerful and the nose wasn't too big it was too big because the angle that the person was

seeing it was the wrong angle right it wasn't the ideal angle and so M because this person was important and Powerful mangelo couldn't just say you're stupid so so what he did was he grabbed a

handful of dust grabbed his pick and then he started like banging it on without hitting the statue and letting the dust fall out on the other side and then said how about this and then he led

the patron to the right angle and the PCT is like ah voila right and but again this goes back to my suggestion about picking the right Patron it's almost

like once you are able to fundraise in this way it's again it's just like a for-profit venture skilled business it's just about it's just as important who you don't take money from of who you do

if you don't want patrons like giving you weird political directives or like giving you weird suggestions then pick patrons who have good taste right and

and who have a track record of not like just interfering with your work so for someone like you who has a background in business and and you're Savvy with those elements and now you're embarking on

this full-time focused content operation online I'm curious to comine your intuitions and observations around where you think this economy is going specifically a very hot topic of course

is higher education and all of that and it sounds like you're still quite interested in that world and possibly traversing that world more thoroughly with some kind of research career of some kind but I'm just curious since you

have one foot in this content economy now and and you also know a thing or two about business what else are you seeing in the Creator economy and the the current kind of trends of writing a

video of and are there interesting phenomena or trends that you're seeing that you're like oh that's going to be big people are sleeping on that or oh that's that's not going to be big people

are like overhyped on that or like this is gonna this is going to replace this part of the University but this part of the university is going to persist I'm just curious what you're seeing and how you think about some of these questions that are hot

topics yeah so the first thing I'll say is I'm probably the the wrong person to ask about this because I do not engage with social media at

all like I block off all of my Twitter feed I block off all my Instagram feeds I really have no I don't really listen to podcasts I literally just spend my time like reading the great books and

reading secondary texts on the great books this even goes as far as so right now I'm trying to hire copywriters to turn my transcripts that I write and

that I give into Twitter threads I think even producing cont this this is the exact same thing as the patrons which is you got to be very careful what you don't do and what you don't expose

yourself to like YouTube having a two-hour long conversation like this giving a two-hour lecture that is a fitting medium for these ideas it's 20 280 characters where you need to compete

with someone who's scrolling away and the next tweet is Elon saying something ridiculous that's not a good medium that's a medium that you as an independent scholar shouldn't want to

exist in however with that said Twitter was probably one of the biggest growth methods that I've gotten through the Gerard lectures and so one way to tap into that is I literally hire

copywriters who have proven track records of writing Twitter threads give them my transcripts and then say just turn these into Twitter threads like I don't want anything to do with this so that's a caveat like I I have no idea

what other people are doing other than my friends like yourself and David in the content game so I I have absolutely no idea let me put it this way I'll rephrase it for you to give you something more to sink your teeth into

isn't it just the case that right now anyone who's in grad school let's say or they're in a PhD program or whatever and let's say they're currently on some kind of trajectory to be a scholar of some kind if they're

talented why would they not do what you're doing essentially right like I I struggle I struggle to see one obvious reason is just tradition inertia Prestige whatever it's like they want to

make their parents proud and their parents think that being a professor is like the thing to do or whatever and that's a perfectly fine to do something and it's a strong human motivator that kind of stuff so no disrespect to that and that's one good reason but like for

anyone who's just thinking about these things from first principles and just wants to have the most brilliant impactful and Brilliant sort of career as a writer thinker researcher in the

public sphere like why would they not just do what you're doing or what I'm doing or some variation on all these things how do you think about that because I think you're more partial to the university so just how do you think about that yeah so I I am very partial

to the universities I think there's great scholarship being done there I in fact if I could only talk to people inside or outside the the universities I'd choose I'd be very sad but I choose

inside the universities versus outside that very narrow narrowly beat out now I think we need to separate your question of why shouldn't they do what I'm doing

and why won't they do what I'm doing and the why won't they do what I'm doing is is obvious it's Mimis it's the lack of prestige or yeah no that's all astute and very reasonable I I see what you're

thinking for sure the university obviously has great advantages and with my own uh Journey obviously I know very well the decline of that Mimis enjoyment factor I know it super clearly because I

I've been in both worlds right I now I have I have a beautiful life and I'm more successful in almost every way than I would have been if I stayed as a professor like I make more money now as an independent scholar than I would have

had I stayed on as a professor and I obviously have much cooler people y yeah and I'm you know I write really freely and I say things I and I say I I could never say as a professor and to me it's

a more full flourishing of my own uh kind of vision for my scholarly life but it is a desert basically mimetically and

that's a very serious loss as you said a minute ago people are highly impressed by just Brands and names of universities and even just saying you're a professor or whatever makes people's eyes light up

a little bit much less now than it used to but nonetheless still that's a legible thing that people respect and whatever and so you do lose something real when you lose those those things for sure but you gain other things and I think what's interesting about another

thing you said is that it is interesting how Silicon Valley is kind of like the alternative poll so that if you are AC academically sophisticated and you do have a genuine sophisticated kind of

scholarly project of some kind or let's just say you have that kind of scholarly calling and you have real work and and you have something real to say and you're capable if you do want to defect

from the institutional establishment of those things namely Academia it is interesting you will if you're good and successful that will basically manifest as currency in the Silicon Valley

circles and I didn't necessarily know that or predict that coming into it but that's something that I've noted and so maybe this is an interesting topic because this whole sociology is very fascinating you look at people companies

and Brands like a16z kind of going more and more into media let's say and even the University of Austin right is a kind of University startup basically coming out of Silicon Valley attitudes in

Silicon Valley you you you were kind of doing the Silicon Valley into academic kind of crossover type of project and so I'm sort of surprised that you're not more bullish on all of that because the

way I'm looking at things is like Silicon Valley is like only just beginning to to rev up like I think over the next 10 to 20 30 40 years Silicon Valley will increasingly be like a kind

of almost like a breakaway civilization within America like all of the money and all of the Power I think moving forward is going to be circulating in this kind of I think because it's increasingly the

source of all new sort of economic value generation and then you look at the all the problems university has had for so long and the whole complex everything from the student loan system to the regulations to the wokeness and all that

all the nonsense it's a whole long laundry list of interlocking kind of problems that seem to be getting worse and worse when when you look at all these things I'm just sort of like someone like you I see you potentially

having a tremendous career as a public thinker staying in the kind of Silicon Valley kind of power center and just developing that and going out further on

that kind of world of things so yeah I it's interesting you don't see see it that way so I I do see it that way I guess I guess what I'm trying to say is

again I think this is the whole R of of this interview which is very helpful for me to myself to clarify is it it depends on the project and the person for what I'm doing right now I'm on the Silicon

Valley side right why because many people in the real world want two-hour introductions to The Republic to the genealogy to the first discourse the phenomenology of spirit I have a second

I have a currently secondary but I think will become primary set of interests that is to do original philosophy around mostly the philosophy of technology and recognition Theory no one is going to be interested in Reading unless they're

already interested in my other stuff right so maybe there's a world in which I start off I mean this is how I'm thinking about it I'm kind of glad I'm doing this right now in my intellectual development where I don't really know

these books very well and I'm currently learning because there will be a point where I get so bored of lecturing on PL that I'm just not excited about doing

that and I want to do my own stuff however when I do that when I do that if okay if I just give you a a 500 page treaties on the philosophy of Technology it's going to take it's going to be a

very specific set of people who are interested in that now if you watch my lectures for 20 years on on Nicha and stuff and then I come out with a scholarly book Maybe you'd be more inclined to to read that but I guess

what I'm trying to say and I'm going to respond directly to your silicon Maly comment which is I am extremely bullish there which is why I went there in the first place outside of college as I began my career but if you look at the

things that people in Silicon Valley are interested in it's just the the the the tippy top not it's not even the tippy top it's one slice of the tippy top of

the humanities if you wanted to just write for that type of audience you are going to be incredibly constrained as an intellectual and your development will be incredbly constrained as well and that's what that's what I'm trying to

get at yeah time will tell I I think that's a it's a reasonable perspective I think I do I on that last point in particular I think I do see that very very differently I because the way I see it is like you're alluding to this but Silicon Valley as a whole is a very

Philistine culture there are very smart people you know very very smart sharp people and you could debate who those key individuals are or whatever but there are some of the smartest most

independent thinkers in the country are in Silicon Valley but as a whole the average is very Philistine I'm talking about like the whole bulk of like Tech workers and in these companies and so on

so it's very philis but to me this is the best possible structure right because you have people with really Deep Pockets who are really smart right they know a provocative thinker when they see one and it it resonates with them and

they want to follow it and they want to be interested in that and support that in different ways but then you also have this massive population of people who really need just like basic education because they're really quite

unsophisticated and and they know it also and and they do have aspirations to be like more educated so I see sort of Silicon Valley probably seeding not

seaing but like being the economic basis for a massive decentralized archipelago of new institutions and you I think you already see it with things like straight press and you see it with things like

the a16z media adventures and you also just see it with patronage as you noted a lot of the generous scribers and donors to substacks and various paid businesses and experiments that the new

breed of Internet intellectuals are are building a lot of the people paying for those things are coming out of tech right so that's the the landscape I'm seeing I think I see that only getting bigger and more sophisticated and getting more developed I think in your

case what makes sense to me about how you're thinking about it is that you're still relatively a young guy and I appreciate your your humility as well Jonathan you see yourself as someone who's really just starting to learn about these things and you you speak

about yourself and that with that humility which I really respect and appreciate and so I could see why someone like you would still want to do a PhD program because you still just want to be surrounded by mentors who are

very academically sophisticated and you want their help and their training to to become a a more full-fledged public thinker and and writer so that makes perfect sense because right now most of

those really good academic experts are still incon in the University but I think you fast forward 10 years from now 15 years from now I think like the

actual number of PhD level professorial level sort of independent Scholars will be as numerous or almost as numerous as the numbers in the universities and that's the puck that I'm skating towards

in the future yeah yeah and that's a future that excites me a great deal I think people don't pay enough attention to the sociology of knowledge production and this is my interview next week of again this Roman Republic of letters how

did the Great Senators the the top men of action also become some of the top Scholars of the day what are the and you I think you can see this the actual type of work that's being produced given

their financial and sociology around knowledge production right one example is the great we talked about this over dinner last week the great Cole thinkers right you think about someone like Marx

or rouso or n they're all kind of loners and I don't think that's unrelated to the idea that the Continental philosophy again painting very Brad Strokes here

wants to upset your your intuitions right they want to say oh you think a but no actually B whereas the the Anglo school and you think about hum and Smith these were people in large bureaucratic

University departments Anglo philosophy is using these crazy systems to justify the most sort of simple moral intuitions right again painting with very broad Str

Strokes here and so I think having you know when people say why aren't there more interesting ideas in the humanities it's because there's not as interesting funding models right and again this is a

very Marxist way of viewing the world right that the underlying structure determines the the overall ideas and culture and so I'm incredibly excited for this future and I just want to make clear to your audience like I am bullish

on that future in fact I'm so bullish that I chose not to go into the academy but I guess my caveat again is it depends on the work that you want to do if you want to figure out like the

essence of I don't know again a narrow topic go into the academy still if you want a general education which is what I'm doing I think this is a perfect medium to do it yeah absolutely

obviously you represent this sort of Silicon Valley Dynamic that I'm describing even more than I do in a way so even though you're still interested in the academy and and for very good reason which I I never have any problem with that to this day I chose to go a

different way I still had a lot of friends in in in the academy and definitely has place for certain types of people depending on what your interests are but yeah you represent the Silicon Valley Dynamic I was talking about even more than I do just in your

in the nature of your trajectory so Jonathan I want to let you go but this was a really interesting conversation I think we touched on a lot of things that are not just they're just not talked about very much this is the really nitty-gritty stuff that is really

important to people who are pursuing a vocation as an independent scholar today but it's confusing and it's weird and it's sometimes awkward for people to talk about so it often doesn't get a lot of airtime on some of the bigger

podcasts or whatever but for my audience and for the type of people that we are I think that this is a really interesting and Rich conversation a lot of nonobvious insights and I'm just glad that I'm giving back to the Fountain

which I originally drank right again I I can't emphasize this enough you were the first person to make me aware independent Scholars right you coined the term full stack professor and this was we've been friends for now what four

years almost right and so it was that germination was obviously it wasn't the last draw the camel's back so to speak but it was definitely uh it helped me get here so I'm just I'm glad I'm able

to contribute appreciate that thank you for saying that thank you for the kind words and I've been inspired by you as well I've definitely been interested in watching how youve built this end you're putting some fire under my ass in a way soz I'm like oh I better increase my

production values I got to get some I got to get some wood paneling behind me or something like that so I I appreciate how much effort you've invested in making your stuff really impressive on that level I look forward to seeing the results best of luck to you Jonathan and

stay in touch great thank you so much